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Exclusive: 2 years after John McAfee’s death, widow Janice is broke and needs answers
Two years after John McAfee’s death, widow Janice tells Magazine she’s penniless and can’t move on until his autopsy records are released.
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Two years after John McAfee’s death, widow Janice tells Magazine she’s penniless and can’t move on until his autopsy records are released.
Janice McAfee, the widow of tech impresario John McAfee, is still in the midst of grief. She is doing odd jobs to feed herself, has run out of funds, and still doesnt know what really happened to her husband.
Since the death of crypto guru and antivirus pioneer husband John McAfee in a Barcelona prison more than two years ago, she has remained in Spain in an undisclosed location and has only been saved from homelessness by the kindness of friends.
She cant move on because she still doesnt know what happened to her husband in spite of a September ruling this year from a Catalan court that John McAfee died by suicide and the case was effectively closed.
In an exclusive Zoom interview with Magazine, she explained her current situation.
For more than two years, Ive not only had to deal with the tragedy of Johns death, but its so hard to move on because the authorities refuse to release the autopsy of his death. I have tried and tried, but they will not let me see it.
There is the opportunity of an independent autopsy, but that will cost 30,000 euros, and I dont have the money to pay for it. All I want is to see his body for myself and know that really happened.
Not having the money myself to make the decision to find out what really happened is hard, but Im hoping that giving this interview will give people the opportunity to know whats really going on. I still have people contacting me who still cant believe hes dead, she says.
What happened to John McAfees $100-million fortune?
Although John was worth more than $100 million after he resigned from antivirus company McAfee in 1994 and sold his stock, his official fortune had dwindled to an estimated $4 million at the time of his death, according to Celebrity Net Worth.
He claimed in 2019 that he had no money and could not pay a $25-million court order over a wrongful death lawsuit. However, he was arrested the following year on U.S. charges of tax evasion, with authorities claiming he and his team had earned $11 million promoting cryptocurrencies. From prison, he told his 1 million Twitter followers he doesnt have any hidden crypto. I have nothing. But I regret nothing.
According to Janice, her husband didnt have a will or an estate, so there is no money, and because of the judgments against him in the U.S., its highly unlikely that any financial legacy will be passed on to her.
There are stories that there are secret caches and documents, but Janice was deliberately kept in the dark (about alleged secret treasure) by her husband, so she wouldnt be in danger. She also has a raft of unanswered questions about Johns untimely end.
I dont think he thought things would have ended the way they did and nor did I. I dont know if he committed suicide; we talked every day after he was imprisoned near Barcelona. I dont know how he got strung up.
I dont know if it was with a rope or a shoelace. In the prison report, it says that when they found him, he was still alive; he had a pulse and was breathing when they found him. A faint pulse, but a pulse is a pulse.
Janice cannot believe that when he was found in the cell with a ligature or shoelace around his neck, medical practitioners there appeared to have attempted CPR on him without removing it first.
I went to school to be a registered nursing assistant, and I know how to do CPR. Even in the movies, its the first thing you do: clear the airways.
If somebody has something tight around their neck, thats the last thing you would do. The first thing would be to remove the obstruction, but you can see from the prison video that didnt happen. I dont know if it was negligence or stupidity; it just feels sinister. But now Im speculating, and I dont want to do that.
Janice McAfee was frightened after Johns death
After her husbands death, Janice was frightened for her safety. While John had told her that the authorities were only after him, not her, she was still worried that she would be a target for others.
John always assured me that he wouldnt tell me anything that would put me in danger; that was a comfort. He was public about the 31 terabytes of information that he apparently possessed, but he never shared that with me, and I have no idea where it is or whether it actually existed.
But I feel safe at the moment. I have nothing to hide, and I dont even know how he really died, let alone what he possessed. If there was an independent autopsy, I can get some peace. There is an opportunity to do so, but its very expensive.
I first met Janice and John at a blockchain conference in Malta in 2018. Like the crypto world at the time, it was chaos but good chaos.
I interviewed him on stage, and it wasnt my finest hour, or maybe it was. There was something about being near him that affected me and made me behave on stage in a more carefree manner. Maybe thats what he could do, a Svengali of sorts.
John had been drinking whisky on the side of the stage but was sober and lucid. Janice was with him, protecting him from the thousands of people who wanted to speak to him.
She reminded me of Kim Kardashian when I interviewed her in Armenia calm, collected and almost zen-like in her presence. I immediately liked Janice and trusted her.
Later after the on-stage interview had been completed, I was approached by a husband-and-wife camera team who was doing a documentary on crypto that was almost finished, but they would love a word with John. Could I help?
I wasnt sure but texted Janice, and she said it was OK; John apparently liked me. I was invited to the penthouse suite and convinced the armed guard outside their room that I could vouch for the people with me. Again, not something I did every day.
John laughed when he saw me. You again, for f–ks sake! But he was civil to the husband-and-wife team and invited me to join him on a private yacht in Valletta Harbour that evening.
What goes on on private yachts stays there, but we became friends there and then, mainly because I was the only one not blowing smoke up my arse, according to John. Further invitations would follow notably to an island off North Carolina when he was still incognito and on the run.
We stayed in touch, and I conducted a couple of interviews with him during the pandemic when I was running a podcast. When I reached out to Janet on Twitter/X to see if she would be interested in doing her first interview, she said John considered me a friend and would be happy to do so.
Janice McAfee still wants to recover John McAfees body
So, thats the backstory to this interview, but what is more important is the journey from this point on. Janice is determined to follow Johns wishes that, if died, he wanted his body to be cremated.
His body is still in the morgue at the prison where he died. I dont know why they decided to hold on to his body. They dont need it. Two years ago, I had the money for an independent autopsy; a year ago, I had the money, but now I dont.
Also read: Holy shit, Ive seen that! Coldies Snoop Dogg, Vitalik and McAfee NFTs: NFT Creator
I am surviving by taking little jobs here and there to feed myself; thats not whats important. What matters is what I can do for John. Im not a victim John was the victim and I need that autopsy report, not to continue a fight against Spanish authorities, but to know what really happened to him.
I put it to Janice that the perception was that John had run out of time and had come to the end of the road. An extradition order to the U.S. had been made hours before his death, and it was surely going to be hard for him in a U.S. prison.
American authorities do not like people who thumb their noses at them, and an example would have been made of him. In some ways, didnt his apparent suicide make complete sense to a proud man?
We never talked about that. Ever. While he did tell me he wanted to be cremated, that was because he knew there were people who wanted him killed, but thats not the point.
I dont want to be on one side or the other. Just tell me what the body says. Im not trying to seek justice theres no such thing on this earth any more. I just want Johns wishes to be fulfilled.
Janice is an American citizen, but shes understandably in no rush to go back to the U.S. when she doesnt know what her status is.
John McAfee Netflix documentary
A Netflix documentary called Running with the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee was released last year and portrays her and John as fugitives, which is not something that Janice thinks represents the real story.
It was more of a tale about the journalists themselves who tried to sensationalize a public figure and werent quite up to it. They centered themselves when the focus should have been on the real story of why McAfee felt disposed to be a so-called fugitive or why Janice was staying with him.
People forget very quickly, and I understand why because the world moves very fast nowadays. I just want him to be remembered properly, and thats the least he deserves.
Janice wants closure. She wants to cremate her husband, remember him with love, and work out what to do next.
I hope she gets her wish. Everybody deserves a chance to move on, and Janice McAfee much more than many others.
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Employment-Population Ratio Revisited
I have been writing some manuscript comments about labour market capacity constraints and inflation, which I hinted at in my previous article. One tangent that came up that will not fit the manuscript is the behaviour of the employment-to-population ra…
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The most popular model input variable historically was the unemployment rate, and it was part of the original “Phillips Curve” of Bill Phillips (although “Phillips Curve” has transmogrified into meaning almost any linkage between labour markets and inflation). The employment-to-population ratio (which I am mainly focussing on herein) was not popular historically because it moved a lot as women entered the workforce. As seen in the top panel of the chart above, we see the pronounced upwards trend from the 1960s to the 1990s. And in the post-2000 period, the ageing population means that there the older cohorts with early retirees drags down the workforce as a percentage of the total 18-65 year old population (which is what the chart above is based on).
The unemployment rate appears to correct for these structural changes — it is the percentage of the population that is looking for work. People who are not looking for work — stay-at-home spouses, people on disability payments, students, retirees, rich people — are not counted as part of the workforce. This explains why the unemployment rate is much smaller than 100% minus the employment-to-population ratio.
The problem with the unemployment rate is that is also affected by structural changes to the economy. (The count of claimants for unemployment insurance was affected by tightening of unemployment insurance policies, but that theoretically should not affect the unemployment rate determined by the BLS survey.) The argument made in the 2010s (which I agreed with) was that the labour market was stagnant, and people drifted out of the official “looking for work” status. They either stopped looking (because they knew there was no chance of being hired), or they entered into educational schemes (of varying quality), or else ended up taking jobs that offered less hours than they desired. Thus, there was increased interest in alternative labour slack measures — other than the people who were convinced that the economy was going to overheat “any minute now” throughout the entire 2012-2020 period. As jobs were created, people drifted into the workforce at roughly the same pace, and so the number of unemployed did not go to zero.
If we just look at the “prime age” (25-54 years old) cohort — which lops off the university and early retirement ages — we got a better picture of the state of the labour market. We just need to compare to post-1990 levels, since the effects of “Women’s Liberation” had largely made there way through the prime age cohort by then. Using this measure, ratio is near the pre-pandemic level, but below the 2000 boom level.
Since I am not offering a forecast for inflation, I will not comment further on the implications for what is happening next (are we truly running out of available workers?). Instead, I just want to point out that this measure made a lot more sense explaining the post-2000 dynamics than the unemployment rate, which misled a lot of people in the previous cycle. From an inflation theory point of view, the break down of various capacity metrics in response to structural changes in the economy makes it difficult to test quantitative models. An indicator might work in one cycle, but it might break down 1-2 cycles later, which is not that surprising given that recent business cycles are about a decade long.
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NYC Struggles With Post-COVID Recovery As Foot Traffic Falls 33%
NYC Struggles With Post-COVID Recovery As Foot Traffic Falls 33%
Sidewalks lined with office workers, especially in lower Manhattan’s financial…
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Sidewalks lined with office workers, especially in lower Manhattan's financial hub around Wall Street and the Midtown area, home to Times Square, was a pre-Covid phenomenon as remote work trends hamper New York City's economic recovery.
First reported by the New York Post, the University of Toronto has published new recovery metrics showing foot traffic in crime-ridden NYC is down 33% compared with 2019, before the pandemic, indicating a souring economic recovery.
Researchers used location-based mobility data derived from smartphones to reveal foot traffic trends in metro areas. They explain that a recovery metric greater than 100% means the city's downtown foot traffic has recovered from pre-Covid levels and vice versa.
NYC's recovery rate of 66% is ranked 54th out of 66 cities - this is embarrassing for the imploding metro area controlled by radical leftists.
While researchers did not explain the cause for the decline, we have outlined remote and hybrid work trends are partially responsible for the fall of office workers in the metro area.
Kastle Systems, the gold-standard measure of office occupancy trends via card-swipe data, shows NYC stands at 48.94% but is still far from the nearly 100% occupancy level before the pandemic.
Without office workers spending their disposable incomes, the local economy will suffer, resulting in a slow and painful recovery.
Besides remote work trends, office workers have fled the progressive hellhole because of high taxes and out-of-control violent crime. Now, the migrant crisis has made things even worse.
NYC's dismal recovery bodes well for bustling city streets in Miami - also known as the 'Wall Street of the South.'
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2020 vs 2023: Are Economists Making The Same Mistake?
The following headline from a July 2020 CNBC article is stunning: Here’s why economists don’t expect trillions of dollars in economic stimulus to create…
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The following headline from a July 2020 CNBC article is stunning: Here’s why economists don’t expect trillions of dollars in economic stimulus to create inflation.
In hindsight, so many economists could not have been more wrong in 2020 about the path of inflation. Today, despite their spurious track record, scores of economists exude confidence in their forecasts for a sustained rate of higher-than-average inflation and a soft economic landing.
Because of their terrible forecasting errors in 2020, let’s review the CNBC article and find the flaw in their logic. The value of this exercise is not to put economists down. Instead, it helps us better appreciate their current logic and how much credence we should put into their projections.
Background July 2020
The fiscal and monetary responses to the COVID pandemic were enormous. The economy was essentially shut down and collapsing at a speed unwitnessed in American history. Even three and half years removed from the onset of COVID, the New York Times headline and graphic below, detailing the unprecedented loss of jobs, is still remarkable.
Within six months of the pandemic’s start, the Federal Reserve grew its balance sheet by $2.8 trillion and cut the Fed Funds rate from 1.50% to 0%. For context, the Fed’s balance sheet growth in the first half of 2020 was $1.6 trillion more than the emergency QE1 conducted in 2008.
The Fed’s actions were meant to support failing financial markets but even more so to allow the government to borrow as much money as it wanted and at meager interest rates.
As shown below, the second quarter 2020 deficit was $2 trillion, or over $500 billion more than the annual deficit used to combat the financial crisis. All other quarterly deficits pale in comparison.
Despite the massive fiscal and monetary onslaught and a severe breakdown in supply lines and the production of most goods, many Wall Street economists were sanguine about inflation prospects.
The Fed was not worried either. As a result, on June 10, 2020, the Fed’s outlook for inflation was 0.8% for the remainder of the year, 1.6% for 2021, and 1.7% for 2022. Over the longer run, they expected inflation to settle in at 2%. As we highlight below, of the 16 FOMC members surveyed, the highest estimate for inflation over multiple future periods was 2.20%. Unfortunately, PCE inflation ultimately peaked at 7.11%!
2020 Logic
The following comes from the article:
Supply shocks have driven up prices for some goods in recent months. Yet many economists expect consumer prices will stay low despite trillions of dollars in government stimulus.
“While there certainly is quite a lot of disruption to the supply side of the economy, that’s likely to be dominated by the huge hit to aggregate demand,” said Evercore ISI Vice Chairman Krishna Guha.
Krishna Guha sums up a popular opinion among economists at the time and one on which the Fed based monetary policy. Despite the sizeable stimulus and enormous supply-side disruptions, price increases would apparently be muted due to the “huge hit to aggregate demand.”
Economists chose to ignore everything except demand. They feared the velocity of money was declining at such a rapid pace it would offset the stimulus, supply line problems, and the unprecedented increase in the money supply.
Monetary velocity measures how often money circulates in an economy. Therefore, the more velocity, the more demand for goods and services.
To expect little inflation, they must have assumed consumers would save the stimulus money for a long time.
The graph below shows the massive surge in the money supply and the recent decline. The increase was unprecedented, as is the current decline.
Velocity Was Misjudged
Per the article:
“At this stage, even with the Fed doing as much as it can, it’s still not leading to an enormous increase in demand,” Olivier Blanchard, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics- CNBC.
Blanchard goes on to say that the $1,200 stimulus checks from the federal government were not extensive enough to stoke inflation.
Despite limitations on what they could spend on, consumers ramped up their spending.
The graph below shows the initial COVID-induced plummet in retail sales. However, a rapid catch-up quickly followed. More importantly, spending continued much faster than the pre-pandemic trend.
Economists ignored tremendous amounts of data pointing to growing inflationary pressures and wrongly predicted a continued decline in monetary velocity. Hence, the colossal underestimate of inflation in mid-2020. The highlighted box in the following graph shows that velocity initially tumbled but quickly stabilized and slowly started rising. Its recovery occurred as the money supply was still increasing.
Review 2020’s Inflation Factors
Before considering today’s situation, let’s summarize the environment of July 2020
- Money supply up 20% year to date – Inflationary
- Monetary velocity down 18% year to date – Disinflationary/Deflationary
- Fed Balance Sheet up 66% year to date – Inflationary
- Fed Funds down from 1.50% to 0.00% – Inflationary
- Government deficit January through July $2.45 Trillion – Inflationary
- Supply lines and means of production broken – Inflationary
- Personal Savings rate rose 468% – Inflationary
- Crude oil fell below $0 in April – Inflationary (prices could only rise)
Monetary Velocity, a proxy for aggregate demand, was weak for a short period, but virtually everything else happening in the economy was inflationary. Once it stabilized, inflation took off.
Current Situation
Let’s start by bringing the inflationary factors above up to date (October 2023).
- Money supply down 2.25% year to date – Disinflationary/Deflationary
- Monetary velocity up 5% year to date – Inflationary
- Fed Balance Sheet down 7% year to date – Disinflationary/Deflationary
- Fed Funds at 5.33% – Disinflationary/Deflationary
- Government deficit Jan. through July $1.20 Trillion – Less inflationary
- Supply lines and means of production fully healed – No marginal effect
- Personal Savings fell 9% year to date – Disinflationary/Deflationary
- Crude oil hovering around $85, $20 above the 5-year average – Disinflationary/Deflationary (prices more likely to revert to average)
It is now three and half years after the pandemic shock, and almost all the factors above have become disinflationary or deflationary. However, there is one outlier- monetary velocity. It is currently inflationary.
Velocity Is Not All That Matters
Once again, the sole focus of economists and the Federal Reserve continues to be on aggregate demand. This time, however, they think it continues to stay red hot.
Can it continue? The base case for inflation to remain higher than the Fed’s 2% objective and a soft landing is to assume it does.
The problem with such a hypothesis is that the U.S. economy’s growth and the financial system’s health depend highly on debt growth. Credit drives our economy, and the health of the economy drives consumer spending.
While the money supply has fallen for ten consecutive months, a feat not accomplished since the Depression, it is still moderately above pre-pandemic levels. For the economy to grow over extended periods, money supply growth must keep up with economic growth.
That aspect makes the graph below concerning. The solid black line is the ratio of M2 to nominal GDP. The dotted line shows its trend. While the ratio is above pre-pandemic levels, it’s well below the trend. Since 2000, when the ratio was below trend, a recession ultimately occurred.
Barring renewed growth in M2, which entails lower rates, a steeper yield curve, and the cessation of QT, a recession is likely.
With a recession, unemployment will rise, wage growth will falter, and consumers will cut back on spending.
The only question in our mind is when.
Summary
Might economists and the Fed be making the same mistake as in 2020: too heavy of a reliance on demand and insufficient consideration for other price factors?
In July of 2020, it was hard to imagine that consumers would spend at the rates they ultimately did. Today, consumers seem to continue to spend despite whatever the Fed does to slow the economy.
It’s easy to get caught up in recent trends and believe they can continue for long periods. Consequently, it’s hard to imagine how they end.
Given the likelihood that economists are again myopic in their inflation forecasts and bond traders are betting on such projections, we see a day soon when a disinflationary or deflationary reality hits the bond market and bond yields plummet.
The post 2020 vs 2023: Are Economists Making The Same Mistake? appeared first on RIA.
recession depression unemployment pandemic stimulus economic growth yield curve monetary policy fomc fed federal reserve recession gdp recovery interest rates consumer spending unemployment stimulus oil
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